The Expert Witness

The Expert Witness

In Law & Order, the expert witness takes the stand to pontificate on a key issue. The case hinges on his or her demeanor. In real life, the expert witness rarely reaches the courtroom but presents his testimony via affidavits and during depositions-and only after hours and hours of review and analysis.

TCDI’s most recent role as expert witness involved a review and audit of a huge electronic discovery repository system, which had been implemented by a vendor hired by a very large company’s law firm. Let’s call the company ProductCo.

ProductCo does business in a highly regulated industry and must comply with an ever-growing burden from regulators. ProductCo relied on their law firm to figure out how best to implement an electronic discovery repository system that would make regulatory reporting more efficient and cost-effective. The law firm engaged a vendor we’ll call Z Inc.

Z Inc. set up the system, and everything seemed to be working fine until eight months later, when the key regulatory agency found that ProductCo may have missed producing certain documents. ProductCo questioned its law firm, who questioned Z Inc. who agreed to do its own internal review to find the problem and fix it.

ProductCo decided that this was a lot like the wolf guarding the chicken coop, and so they hired TCDI to do an independent review and audit of the system. TCDI produced a report that convinced ProductCo and its law firm that the flaw in the system had, in fact, been corrected. TCDI then served as an expert witness on behalf of ProductCo, persuading the regulatory agency that all was in order.